PRO FOOTBALL; Michaels Cuts His Ties With 'Monday Night'

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: February 9, 2006

ESPN has released a discontented Al Michaels from his contract to call ''Monday Night Football'' for the next eight years and named Mike Tirico the play-by-play voice of the series for the foreseeable future.

The final break with Michaels came Tuesday, two days after he called the Super Bowl on ABC; the talks culminated with his cutting his ties to ESPN as well as his contract to call National Basketball Association games on ABC Sports. ESPN and ABC are owned by the Walt Disney Company.

''Once it was clear he had reservations, we decided to move on,'' John Skipper, ESPN's executive vice president for content, said yesterday in a phone interview.

Michaels is expected to soon announce his move to NBC to call Sunday night games with John Madden, his partner on ''Monday Night'' at ABC, which has relinquished its rights to the games.

A spokesman for NBC Universal Sports, Mike McCarley, had no comment on when Michaels would be hired. Michaels could not be reached.

ESPN had previously named Joe Theismann as the ''Monday Night'' analyst, but it announced yesterday that its newest hire for the series was Tony Kornheiser, the co-host of ESPN's ''Pardon the Interruption'' and a columnist for The Washington Post since 1984. Kornheiser auditioned in 2000 for the ''Monday Night'' position that went to the comedian Dennis Miller, who lasted two seasons before the show was revamped and Madden was hired.

''It's cool that as a sportswriter they came back and asked me,'' Kornheiser said on a conference call. ''It isn't generally in the career path of a sportswriter to do this. So you've got to take it.''

Since his television and radio careers have taken off over the past few years, Kornheiser has written less for The Post. Despite the ''Monday Night'' job, he said, ''I would do anything I can to remain with the Post.'' He is also host of a daily four-hour radio program on WTEM-AM, a sports talk station in Washington. Kornheiser and his ''P.T.I.'' co-host, Michael Wilbon, another Post columnist, will do that show each Monday from the site of that night's game.

Kornheiser joked that not since his bar mitzvah had he stayed up past midnight, a time that ''Monday Night'' has traditionally gone beyond. He added: ''I live like a barnyard animal. I'm asleep at 9 and up by 5.''

Skipper said ESPN was not bound by the conventional wisdom of having a commentator who once played or coached any more than ABC was when it hired Howard Cosell for ''Monday Night'' in 1970.

All those who have followed Cosell have, in some way, been compared with Cosell, who was unique to his time.

Tirico said he was not sure that he would replace Michaels until after Sunday's Super Bowl. One of ESPN's and ABC's most versatile voices, Tirico has moved easily between anchoring studio shows and calling college football and basketball and N.B.A. games.

He called the new assignment ''a humbling experience,'' putting him in a small group of ''Monday Night'' play-by-play announcers: Keith Jackson, who called the first season, Frank Gifford and Michaels.

Michaels, who last July signed an eight-year contract worth $4 million annually, refused to discuss publicly why he chose to follow ''Monday Night'' to ESPN, which will not have any postseason games, or why he wanted to get out of the ESPN contract. NBC, which had wooed him after it hired Madden, will carry playoff games and Super Bowls.

Michaels insisted that he did not go to ESPN for the money, which exceeded the $2.9 million annual salary NBC had offered, but he said that after 20 years, the words ''Monday Night Football'' still made his spine tingle.

In agreeing to work for ESPN, he knew he was separating from Madden. But in the subsequent months, NBC hired Fred Gaudelli, ABC's ''Monday Night'' producer, and Drew Esocoff, the series's director.

In the past few weeks, Skipper said, he became aware of Michaels's change of heart.

''In November, he said it was the best job ever invented,'' Skipper said on the conference call. ''As long as Al was committed to us, we were committed to him.'' He declined to give any of the details of the terms of Michaels's leaving his contract, but he said, ''We reached a satisfactory resolution.''

He said he was certain that Tirico, Theismann and Kornheiser would ''execute our vision'' for ''Monday Night,'' including a full day of programming on various networks and other ESPN businesses leading up to each game. Each broadcast is intended to be a mini-Super Bowl.

In addition to being replaced by Tirico on ''Monday Night,'' Michaels will be replaced, starting Sunday, by Mike Breen as the No. 1 announcer for N.B.A. games on ABC, working with Hubie Brown. Breen, the voice of the Knicks on the MSG Network, has called the N.B.A. for ESPN and ABC since 2003.

In the months since Michaels spurned NBC's offer, the network quietly groomed Cris Collinsworth for the play-by-play job. Collinsworth, one of football's toughest analysts, was hired by NBC to be its top analyst on its Sunday night studio program. Collinsworth rehearsed his play-by-play calling during various games, and at least once at the Pleasanton, Calif., studio owned by Madden. Sterling Sharpe, a former ESPN studio analyst who currently works for the NFL Network, is expected to join Bob Costas and Collinsworth in the NBC studio.